A Trader's Guide to $1,000,000,000

If i wasn't moving to a new place, I would have created a TLDR version already. I'll def update once I get the time though ;)

bumped, I'm not even level 15 yet and i'm reading this, to try and get a head start on it :) thanks for this guide!! R+

Find 3 skateboards in the city and you have 1.2 billion. Easy. :P

very interesting guide! I usually stay away from trading, cause I'm to insecure etc, so I mostly do stock trading, as it's mostly just centered around me, and no other players are usually involved..

But having read the guide I might take a shot at the normal trading ^^

R+

Sounds good! Trading isn't for everyone, so if you think you've hit a wall in trying to make a profit, revert back to the stock market. But trying out trading is definitely a worth-while investment. I'm making a stock market guide atm, not sure if it'll be as "in-depth" as this one, but when I post it I'll let ya know. ;)

Smart ass[:tongue:]

Then your already ahead of the game my friend. ;)

Let me know if you have any questions. Mail/Chat me anytime

Some people are lucky and find valuable stuff and other people have to make money. But yesterday I banked my first 100 million. It feels good.

lol but "finding" items in the city doesn't really pertain to trading...because its all profit. You're given it for free and you don't have to worry about profit margin. If you were trading it from someone else and expecting to make a profit from it on resale, then that would be considered trading.

Traders love the people that find items however, because typically those people will sell it for a cheaper cost for a quick profit. That leaves a decent profit margin for a trader to exploit.

Bump-digity

Title: Trader
My networth after 97 days: $997,976,334 (+$7,500,000 in faction bank)

YAY!

$1,000,000,000!

Congrats my friend. ;)

I used to really enjoy trading but now it isn't as fun. How do you think trading is now compared to before?

It was more fun without the bazaars I think. If you were active you could easily have runners working for you. Now they come back list the items and by the time they land they have sold.

To be a good trader you have to know what items are actually selling for. Not just what they are listed on the market. Once you know this you can get a good deal and make good money.

Now you can get good deals by trading for people who want to sell fast but for me the fun of searching for buyers and sellers and negotiating prices is totally gone

hellos,

Most runners these days sell their stuff on their bazaar if they are active. Those that are not so active and fear getting mugged while selling their stuff, will try and find us traders to trade a large sum of their stuff at once.

I can understand your reasoning of enjoying the process of making a deal with someone through the art of haggling. I too enjoy making trades as opposed to bazaar sales. It can be quite enjoyable. However, to me it sounds like you did a lot of dealing in travel related items. If you branch out and trade items that are not easily accessible (ie, DP's, FHC's, Cans, DVD's, etc.) you will find a greater market of people wanting to trade in person. Look for that big ticket item in the bazaar list or in the forums and strike up a conversation with the seller to see if your able to haggle with them. Most people bite and wouldn't mind to haggle if your counter offer isn't unreasonable. haha

Thats my opinion though. Let me know what you think!

i used to trade in everything that could make money and did really well out of it. As bazzars came in people just list their items on them and wouldn't trade as much.

I preferred it the way it was before the system changed but I am sure there are going to be loads of people who preferred the change. Just depends on how you like to play.

Rated for the guide! Though i ain't a trader, a thumbs up for your time making this guide for others :)

Figured I'd post this message I got. I thought it was a good one to share.


BloodTorrent : Hello!
I just read your guide on how to get 1bil through trading. It is very interesting and helped me a lot. What I am curious about is why people would buy something like a brick. I can understand beer, for the nerve. But I cannot find a use for a brick. Another question that rose in my mind is how so much cesium gets into the market and how a single faction could accumulate so much. I have heard it is a special item only gotten by donators, but I am not sure about this. 300 cesium is a LOT. OR at least a lot for someone of my level. My last question would be if I come across something like an amulet, should I liquefy it into points or try to sell the thing itself?
Thanks,
-BT


Jorgy411 : Lots of questions!

If you have no money to start out with, buying bricks for $5 a piece from the city and then reselling them for $500 is an easy profit. You can buy 100 everyday, and make a profit of about 50k a day with bricks. Bricks are used as a temporary item when fighting someone. You can throw them at other players to a considerable amount of damage (not the best, but still fairly good). The reason why it sells for so much is because only a small amount of bricks are sold in the city on a daily basis (which is why you sometimes dont see bricks for sale at Big Als). For this reason, bricks are limited to who buys them first, creating a "demand for them" for players that want bricks but couldnt buy them from the city. Bricks are also used for a plethora of other means such as trashing items in the dump, merits for selling alot of items in bazaar, faction termed wars, etc. There might be alot in circulation, but since bricks are so cheap, the market hasn't fluctuated much due to most people no truely dabbling in brick sales. Most players don't trade bricks as their main income. Bricks are a pretty good early game mechanic to exploit if you need a small amount of cash fast.

You cannot buy cesium from the game. Its only generated from City finds and given out randomly to subscribers on a month basis. 100 Cesium is used to create a Dirty Bomb (a very powerful weapon used in conjunction with faction warfare). On average there is 100 cesium generated a month (from subscriber reward/city find events). For this reason, cesium can be very expensive. A lot traders use this item as a medium to trade. Traders will find sellers of cesium (by means stated in my forum post), and attempt to buy their cesium at a lower price. We then "resell" that cesium to someone that will pay us more for what we bought it for. When looking at profit margin, its not the best return you can obtain, but since the item costs a significant amount of money, you can make an easy 10-50mil off one cesium (depending on how much you bought it for). 300 cesium would be the equivalent to about 60 billion dollars. So your accusation of 300 cesium being an expensive item would be correct! Even for someone at MY level! haha

To answer your last question, you can do 1 of 3 options.
1) Sell the Amulet to a trusted trader that wont try to mug you after the trade is finished. At the moment, Amulets are going for WAY more then market value. Reason behind this is because a lot of people are using these items as "collectibles". As long as you sell the Amulet for more than 700mil, you will make the most money this way. Keep in mind, if you sold the amulet for 1 billion dollars and the trader then proceeds to "mug" you before you had a chance to bank the money, they could potentially mug hundereds of millions off you.
2) Turn the Amulet into 10,000 points and sell off your stash of points in small quantities. This option would be the safest way to bank your money from obtain an amulet. Simply sell 100 points at a time until you've sold through all 10,000 points. It would take some time, but it would be the safest way to earn your money off an amulet.
3) Keep it as a collectible. If your okay on money and want to boast to your friends that you have an extremely rare item, this is an acceptable option.

Hope this helps.

~Jorgy

hey, really nice guide but i got a few questions. the biggest problem i face is finding good deals that will allow me to make profit, i've never seemed to get past this obstacle. despite the fact i'm fairly active on the trade chat and item market, the items i target right now e.g fhc, dp, edvd, cans; i can never find them for a price which i can make a decent profit. well, i think that its my ignorance of what sort of prices i should be looking for is mainly the problem. can you give me some advice on this, maybe some examples of what you would do if you were in my shoes would be extremely helpful and i would appreciate it immensely. thanks.

Excellent guide, lots of detail. I'd like to add a few points:

1) for beginners, plushies are good to run. You rarely get mugged for plushie profits (unlike drugs). The plushies generating the best profit per hour of travel varies with the market, but generally the plushies from UK and Argentina are top of the list (and jaguars from Mexico are the worst). Wolverines from Canada are the best profit plushie that requires very little cash investment.

2) It is more profitable to exchange a complete set of flowers for points than it is to sell them for cash. However, if you use the time it would take you to gather a complete set and instead only run Heather, Ceibo flowers, or Cherry Blossoms, you will make more money doing that than the value of points. This is independent of whether you have a PI or use WLT BB, because time cancels out of the comparison. However, depending on the cost of points (about $68K now) and the cost of the flowers at market, the list could change. I've found it to be pretty stable though. The key is to consider profit per hour of travel time.

3) WLT is a luxury. It does not pay for itself in travel runs (unless of course you bought the stock low and are using it until you sell it high). If you invested the money spent on WLT on other investments, you would get a better return elsewhere. However, if you've exhausted all other options (maxed bank account and purchased all of the good BBs in stocks), then it is a better investment than a Cayman's account if you're actively running.

Rainman,

You might be looking at this the wrong way...finding "good" deals doesn't happen very often. The type of trader I am, i make a lot of small deals that turn out to be a good profit at the end of the day. This is why being active is very important. As a trader, we live in the small window called profit margin. Most of the time, if we can re-sell something for an extra 5-10% resale value, thats considered a "good" deal in my opinion. To solve your problem about finding deals for trade, try expanding your search to the trading post forums. If you haven't created a personal trading thread yet, do so now in the Trading Post Forums so people know what your wanting to buy. The items you are currently focusing on are items that fluctuate very rarely, thus you'd find the best deals when buying in bulk. I'll use FHC's as an example since that's one the items you've listed that your trying to trade.

Feathery Hotel Coupons are selling on average about $12,500,000 a piece. This value is what you have to SELL the item for (or above if at all possible). So if you want to make a profit, you'll need to buy this item for less than 12.5mil. Lets say you bought 20 FHC's at 12.3mil a piece on average from bazaar sales. 12.3mil - 12.5mil = 200k profit per FHC. 200k profit for 20 FHC's yields 4mil in profits (or 1.62% profit). This typically isn't such a great deal in a traders eyes, but its a profit non-the-less. Now let's say you're experienced in the arts of haggling and you managed to find a seller that wants to sell FHC's in bulk found in the trading post forums or on trade chat. They offer to sell you all 20 FHCs for 12.3mil but you haggle them down to 12mil a piece. Using the same math above, your profits are now 10mil on the 20 FHC deal (or 4% profit margin). This is a good deal for most traders that are willing to dedicate the time/effort. Obviously not all deals are the same, but if you can manage to create multiple deals like this in a day, you can easily make 50mil+ a day.

A good tip to follow when you're trying to haggle a better deal out of a trader would be to talk about the overall price you're going to pay them for their "bulk" of items. In this instance, when you go to haggle, say your willing to buy all 20 FHC's for 240mil instead of 12mil a piece. 240mil sounds a lot better than 12mil....Its stupid, but I find that keeping their overall payment in their mind helps create more leeway when you want to increase your profit margin by getting a better deal. If you cant get a better deal more than 2% profit margin, it's likely something you'd want to avoid. After all....buying in bulk promotes a discount because you're willing to give the seller a large sum of cash imo.

Another good tip for haggling would be to start off your negotiations lower then what your willing to settle for to anticipate any counter offers they might fight back with. Following this tactic, might not get what you want, but it'll be a better offer than what you might have ended up with. If the seller isn't going to accept "anything less" than their "minimum amount", you might have to wiggle out of your comfort zone to make the deal happen. Just make sure that you are always making a profit, otherwise it's not a worth-while transaction on your end.

There are a few circumstances that you may want to overpay for something...I can recall an example of my own, where I traded a low leveled player about 5% above market value on their drug runs for me in order to get a better deal out of them when they tried to sell their hazmat suit. I ended up paying an extra 50mil to them for their drugs to "build" their trust for them to sell their hazmat suit to me for about 200mil under market value. It helped that this player was in my faction at the time, so they knew I wouldn't try to mug them when i paid the billions for their hazmat suit.

Anyway, it seems like i'm getting carried away here. Let me know if this helps you at all or if you have more questions!